Alex Albon spills on pricey dinner with George Russell after “miserable” Monaco GP

Williams Formula 1 driver Alex Albon has shared details about his dinner with Mercedes’ George Russell following the Monaco Grand Prix. Albon ultimately paid the bill, as promised, after his tactics held up Russell during the race around the streets of Monte Carlo. 

A mandatory two-stop strategy was enforced ahead of the race with the aim of making it more exciting for fans after years of the race being branded “boring” and “processional”. However, this instead led to a number of drivers purposefully slowing in order to build a gap for their team-mate to benefit from a more efficiently timed pitstop. This was the case for Williams and Albon, who ended up blocking Russell.

The Mercedes driver joked with the media following the race, stating that Albon owed him dinner for this reason.

While speaking Motorsport.com and other media ahead of the race weekend in Spain, Albon has now shared details on the dinner, explaining:

 “[The dinner with Russell was] great. He ordered the most expensive thing on the menu. He did, actually. It was the lobster pasta. But he skipped on dessert, so it kind of equalled out. But it was good. It was good. It was a fun evening.”

Clarifying that he did pick up the bill, the Williams driver added: “I did pay, yeah.

“I was going to pay. I mean, I should pay. That was miserable, that race. I can’t imagine that…

“We had something to pay in it, so at least it felt like we had something going, because obviously for… others, it was a bit worse, but yes.”

The enforced two-stop strategy was a big talking point following the Monaco Grand Prix. However, not for Albon and Russell, who for the most part kept their conversation over dinner away from their workday.

“No, honestly, there’s very little talk about racing,” the Thai-British driver continued.

“There’s not much talk about racing outside of the racing. So, yeah, no, not too much. I mean, we do talk about it, and honestly, kind of going to a point is, it seems tricky to know actually what to really do to improve some of that racing that we saw, because I do think it was worth a try.

“And I think collectively, all of us, teams and drivers, we thought the two stops should create something, but obviously it just moved the goalpost a little bit, so we need to have a bit of another reconsideration of what we can do to improve some of the racing.”